VIII.
Poles, Tschechs, and Germans

MARCH 5th, 1852.

FROM what has been stated in the foregoing articles, it is
already evident that unless a fresh revolution was to follow that of March,
1848, things would inevitably return, in Germany, to what they were before this
event. But such is the complicated nature of the historical theme upon which we
are trying to throw some light, that subsequent events cannot be clearly
understood without taking into account what may be called the foreign relations
of the German Revolution. And these foreign relations were of the same
intricate nature as the home affairs.

The whole of the eastern half of Germany, as far as the Elbe, Saale, and
Bohemian Forest, has, it is well known, been reconquered during the last
thousand years, from invaders of Slavonic origin. The greater part of these
territories have been Germanized, to the perfect extinction of all Slavonic
nationality and language, for several centuries past; and if we except a few
totally isolated remnants, amounting in the aggregate to less than a hundred
thousand souls (Kassubians in Pomerania, Wends or Sorbians in Lusatia)[1]
, their inhabitants are, to all intents and purposes, Germans. But the case is
different along the whole of the frontier of ancient Poland, and in the
countries of the Tschechian tongue, in Bohemia and Moravia. Here the two
nationalities are mixed up in every district, the towns being generally more or
less German, while the Slavonic element prevails in the rural villages, where,
however, it is also gradually disintegrated and forced back by the steady
advance of German influence.

The reason of this state of things is this: ever since the time of
Charlemagne, the Germans have directed their most constant and persevering
efforts to the conquest, colonization, or, at least, civilization of the east
of Europe. The conquest of the feudal nobility between the Elbe and the Oder,
and the feudal colonies of the military orders of knights in Prussia and
Livonia, only laid the ground for a far more extensive and effective system of
Germanization by the trading and manufacturing middle classes, which in
Germany, as in the rest of Western Europe, rose into social and political
importance since the fifteenth century. The Slavonians, and particularly the
Western Slavonians (Poles and Tschechs), are essentially an agricultural race;
trade and manufactures never were in great favor with them. The consequence was
that, with the increase of population and the origin of cities in these
regions, the production of all articles of manufacture fell into the hands of
German immigrants, and the exchange of these commodities against agricultural
produce became the exclusive monopoly of the Jews, who, if they belong to any
nationality, are in these countries certainly rather Germans than Slavonians.
This has been, though in a less degree, the case in all the east of Europe. The
handicraftsman, the small shopkeeper, the petty manufacturer, is a German up to
this day in Petersburg, Pesth, Jassy, and even Constantinople; while the
money-lender, the publican, the hawker—a very important man in these
thinly populated countries—is very generally a Jew, whose native tongue
is a horribly corrupted German. The importance of the German element in the
Slavonic frontier localities, thus rising with the growth of towns, trade and
manufactures, was still increased when it was found necessary to import almost
every element of mental culture from Germany; after the German merchant and
handicraftsman, the German clergyman, the German schoolmaster, the German
savant came to establish himself upon Slavonic soil. And lastly, the
iron thread of conquering armies, or the cautious, well-premeditated grasp of
diplomacy, not only followed, but many times went ahead of the slow but sure
advance of denationalization by social development. Thus, great parts of
Western Prussia and Posen have been Germanized since the first partition of
Poland, by sales and grants of public domains to German colonists, by
encouragements given to German capitalists for the establishment of
manufactories, etc., in those neighborhoods, and very often, too, by
excessively despotic measures against the Polish inhabitants of the country.

In this manner the last seventy years had entirely changed the line of
demarcation between the German and Polish nationalities. The Revolution of 1848
calling forth at once the claim of all oppressed nations to an independent
existence, and to the right of settling their own affairs for themselves, it
was quite natural that the Poles should at once demand the restoration of their
country within the frontiers of the old Polish Republic before 1772. It is
true, this frontier, even at that time, had become obsolete, if taken as the
delimitation of German and Polish nationality; it had become more so every year
since by the progress of Germanization; but then, the Germans had proclaimed
such an enthusiasm for the restoration of Poland, that they must expect to be
asked, as a first proof of the reality of their sympathies to give up
their share of the plunder. On the other hand, should whole tracts of
land, inhabited chiefly by Germans, should large towns, entirely German, be
given up to a people that as yet had never given any proofs of its capability
of progressing beyond a state of feudalism based upon agricultural serfdom? The
question was intricate enough. The only possible solution was in a war with
Russia. The question of delimitation between the different revolutionized
nations would have been made a secondary one to that of first establishing a
safe frontier against the common enemy. The Poles, by receiving extended
territories in the east, would have become more tractable and reasonable in the
west; and Riga and Mitau would have been deemed, after all, quite as important
to them as Danzig and Elbing. Thus the advanced party in Germany, deeming a war
with Russia necessary to keep up the Continental movement, and considering that
the national re-establishment even of a part of Poland would inevitably lead to
such a war, supported the Poles; while the reigning middle class partly clearly
foresaw its downfall from any national war against Russia, which would have
called more active and energetic men to the helm, and, therefore, with a
feigned enthusiasm for the extension of German nationality, they declared
Prussian Poland, the chief seat of Polish revolutionary agitation, to be part
and parcel of the German Empire that was to be. The promises given to the Poles
in the first days of excitement were shamefully broken. Polish armaments got up
with the sanction of the Government were dispersed and massacred by Prussian
artillery; and as soon as the month of April, 1848, within six weeks of the
Berlin Revolution, the Polish movement was crushed, and the old national
hostility revived between Poles and Germans. This immense and incalculable
service to the Russian autocrat was performed by the Liberal
merchant-ministers, Camphausen and Hansemann. It must be added that this Polish
campaign was the first means of reorganizing and reassuring that same Prussian
army, which afterward turned out the Liberal party, and crushed the movement
which Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann had taken such pains to bring about.
"Whereby they sinned, thereby are they punished." Such has been the fate of all
the upstarts of 1848 and 1849, from Ledru Rolin to Changarnier, and from
Camphausen down to Haynau.

The question of nationality gave rise to another struggle in Bohemia. This
country, inhabited by two millions of Germans, and three millions of Slavonians
of the Tschechian tongue, had great historical recollections, almost all
connected with the former supremacy of the Tschechs. But then the force of this
branch of the Slavonic family had been broken ever since the wars of the
Hussites in the fifteenth century. The province speaking the Tschechian tongue
was divided, one part forming the kingdom of Bohemia, another the principality
of Moravia, a third the Carpathian hill-country of the Slovaks, being part of
Hungary. The Moravians and Slovaks had long since lost every vestige of
national feeling and vitality, although mostly preserving their language.
Bohemia was surrounded by thoroughly German countries on three sides out of
four. The German element had made great progress on her own territory; even in
the capital, in Prague, the two nationalities were pretty equally matched; and
everywhere capital, trade, industry, and mental culture were in the hands of
the Germans. The chief champion of the Tschechian nationality, Professor
Palacky, is himself nothing but a learned German run mad, who even now cannot
speak the Tschechian language correctly and without foreign accent. But as it
often happens, dying Tschechian nationality, dying according to every fact
known in history for the last four hundred years, made in 1848 a last effort to
regain its former vitality—an effort whose failure, independently of all
revolutionary considerations, was to prove that Bohemia could only exist,
henceforth, as a portion of Germany, although part of her inhabitants might
yet, for some centuries, continue to speak a non-German language.

LONDON, February, 1852.

Footnotes

[1]
Lusatia, an ancient territory of Germany, north of Bohemia, to which the whole
of it originally belonged. Later it belonged to Saxony, and still later, in
1815, was divided between Saxony (the northern part) and Prussia (the
southern).